Skittles Lab Report

Senses: How we Identify Different Flavors of Food

Aim: To be able to identify the five different fruit flavors of skittles by using the sense of taste, while the participants of this experiment are blindfolded.

Research Question: How are we able to identify the five different fruit flavors of skittles (strawberry, orange, grape, lime, and lemon) by only using our sense of taste?

Hypothesis: I believe that the blind fold will make it harder for the participants to determine what fruit flavored skittle they have just ingested. This may also alter their perception of taste.

Independent Variable: The sense of taste will be tested by ingesting the five different flavors of skittles including:

 Eating a strawberry flavored skittle

 Eating a lemon

Data Collection and Processing: Identifying Different Flavors of Skittles Lemon Strawberry Orange Grape Lime Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No

Trial 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1

Trial 2 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1

Trial 3 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1

Total 1 2 2 1 3 0 3 0 0 3

Average 0.333 0.667 0.667 0.333 1 0 1 0 0 1

Some of which included gathering the blind folds and buying two packs of skittles to make sure there was defiantly enough of each flavor (strawberry, orange, lime, lemon, and grape) to be used three different times. Also, I needed to find fifteen different people who were willing to participate in my experiment. All of which were not allergic to skittles. While achieving this experiment, I’ve encountered some weaknesses and limitations along the way. Some weaknesses that I was faced with included finding appropriate times to conduct this experiment, because of the fact that I divided the fifteen participants up into three different groups. If I had not done this, the experiment would have been rushed due to the long amount of time that it would have taken to complete, and the results might not have been as precise. Another weakness that I encountered was being able to find a way to provide the skittles to test on the participants because of my busy